York: Random House, 1976), 30. On blacks’ influence among the Seminoles,
see Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Africans and Creeks (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1979). On Elliot’s Iowa eye-color experiment, see the PBS Frontline
documentary, A Class Divided (video, Yale University Films. Alexandria,
Virginia: PBS, 1986). On the Arctic, see “Discoverers’ Sons Arrive for
Reunion,” Burlington Free Press, May 1, 1987; Susan A. Kaplan, introduction
to Matthew Henson, A Black Explorer at the North Pole (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Amy
Wallace, Significa (New York: Dutton, 1983), 17- 18. Note that The American
Adventure blithely assumes assimilation to white society as the goal.
31 That racism has varied is a problem for black rhetors who seek to make it
always the overwhelming force of history, which, of course, reduces our
ability to recognize other factors.
32 James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, Mississippi: Conflict and Change
(New York: Pantheon, 1980), 141.
33 FitzGerald, America Revised, 158. Matthew Downey makes the same point
in “Speaking of Textbooks: Putting Pressure on the Publishers,” History
Teacher 14 (1980): 68.
34 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 343.
35 Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 182;
Henry quoted in J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as
a Social Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 23.
36 The American Adventure, an inquiry textbook partly assembled from
primary sources, includes more of the letter from which the quoted sentence
was drawn. Henry went on to write, “Let us transmit to our descendants,
together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence of
slavery.” His biographer, Richard R. Beeman, treats Henry’s view of slavery
drily: “If it was not hypocrisy, then it was at least self-deception on a grand
scale.” See Patrick Henry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 97.
37 Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery,” in Peter S. Onuf, ed.,
Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993),
181-221, is an extensive analysis of Jefferson’s slaveholding and the
difference it made on his thought.